When color development processing is carried out after a silver halide photographic light-sensitive material is exposed to light, an oxidized aromatic primary amine developing agent reacts with a dye forming coupler to form a color image. In this process, color reproduction by a substractive process is generally utilized. In accordance with this process, color images of yellow, magenta and cyan, which are complement colors of blue, green and red, respectively, are formed in order to reproduce images of blue, green and red.
Phenol derivatives or naphthol derivatives are mainly used as cyan color image forming couplers. However, the color images formed from conventionally employed phenol derivatives or naphthol derivatives have some problems with respect to preservability. For example, color images formed from the 2-acylaminophenol cyan couplers as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,367,531, 3,369,929, 2,423,730 and 2,801,171 generally have inferior fastness to heat. Color images formed from the 2,5-diacylaminophenol cyan couplers as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,772,162 and 2,895,826 generally have inferior fastness to light, and color images formed from 1-hydroxy-2-naphthamide cyan couplers generally have inferior fastness to both light and heat (particularly humidity and heat).
Further, 5-hydroxy-6-acylaminocarbostyryl cyan couplers as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,327,173 and 4,564,586 and 4-hydroxy-5-acylaminooxyindole cyan couplers and 4-hydroxy-5-acylamino-2,3-dihydro-1,3-benzimidazol-2-one cyan couplers as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,430,423 are apt to form yellow stain in unexposed white background areas due to light and heat although color images formed therefrom have good fastness to light and heat. Thus, it has been desired to solve such problems.